Thursday, February 8, 2018

The Ingenious Grant for Playwriting Increasing Quality Roles for Young Women

Town Hall Theater is offering a $1,000 prize for a new play with several interesting roles for young women. We want to give young actresses the opportunity to be the heroines or villainesses of a variety of stories. The winning play will receive a staged reading at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, Vermont with the possibility of a full production in the Fall of 2018.

To be considered, plays must have young female characters (ages 18 and under) with speaking roles that go beyond the stereotypical girlfriend, daughter or nerdy best friend roles. Older roles and roles for men are welcome, but the story should have a young female protagonist and female supporting characters. Please note that an abundance of female characters does not necessarily guarantee a female protagonist. For our purposes, the main character should be female and it should be her journey we follow.

Plays can be any genre, but it must be family-friendly or at least rated PG. We’d like to see lady pirates, evildoers, explorers, nerds, adventurers, poets, robots, preachers, goofballs, creatures, etc.- a wide array of roles for young women. We will also not turn away a well-made play set in a school. Musicals will be considered. We are not accepting adaptations or translations at this time.

Nuts and Bolts:
Plays should have at least a 50 minute run-time.

Submissions may not have had a previous production. Previous staged readings are fine.
One submission per playwright, please. International playwrights may apply, but we ask that the script be in English.

Submissions are due June 1, 2018. The winning playwright will be notified September 1, 2018. Email scripts as a PDF traditional play script formatting and numbered pages. We’d like the first 3 pages to be the following:
1. Contact page with your name, email, address and phone
2. A separate title page
3. A brief synopsis/ character description page.

Submissions will be read “blind”; therefore, we ask that identifying information be kept off every page except the first (see above).

Playwrights are invited to be a part of the reading or production process. The extent of the playwright’s involvement will be determined by future funding and availability/ interest on the part of the individual playwright.